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12 Oz Mouse
Drawings that look literally like they were done by a preschooler. Stories that have little or no plot. It seems like sometimes the voice over talent has nothing to go on and they are just trying to fill long gaps in the dialogue. Trying to be edgy the creators forgot about any vestige of quality. Forgettable if you are lucky.

6Teen
SIX TEENage friends (get it?) that hang around and work at a mall. Three girls and three guys, all sixteen years old dealing with peer pressure, lousy jobs, dating, and other teenage crises. The title is about as subtle as the rest of the writing. Not that it’s unpleasant. It’s just not very good. The characters are fairly thin and the plots are not too deep either.

The 7D
A retelling of the seven dwarves stories. Boilerplate and flat.

9
A war between people using intelligent machines becomes a war between people and intelligent machines, and people are wiped out. The earth is ruined, and the remaining war machines wander around killing anything they find. A doll, number 9, awakes amid the rubble. He discovers others of his kind, gets them to stop hiding, and leads them to fight back against the machines. Well done, inspiring, with a deep meaning, message, and subtexts. Emotionally draining. It’s likely to be too intense for kids though.

.Hack// Legend.
Similar premise to .Hack// Sign but not nearly as good as the first series.

.Hack// Liminality
People are falling into comas while playing The Game. A former executive with The CC Corporation that runs The World tries to figure out what is going on. The story takes place entirely in the real world. Mediocre animation. Average writing. What made the original .Hack// Sign interesting was that they were trying to solve a similar puzzle from within the game. This is the same except that by staying on the outside it loses it’s cleverness. From the outside it isn’t that interesting or compelling. Large parts were just characters talking interminably trying to sound noir. The end was vague, unclear, and unsatisfying. The series was a companion to a series of video games which are no longer available. That explains a lot.

.Hack//Quantum
From 2010; after Legend, Liminality, and Roots. Something is wrong in the World. Players are getting hurt for real. Players cannot log out. The World is being manipulated. Similar in design and feel to the original .Hack//Sign this short series moves fast and has a clear plot. It is short too, only three episodes. I believe it may have been intended to be a one hour movie. The animation is superb, movie grade CGI and flat animation. The music is gorgeous. The voiceover talent excellent. After a number of decidedly sub par offerings I had about given up on the .Hack// series. This redeems it. I hope it is a foretaste of what’s to come.

.Hack//Roots
I am so annoyed with this one I could just spit. The story is as good as the original .Hack/Sign. The plot development is slow to the point of being frustrating at times, just like the first but as it wraps up it builds to a good finale. I was expecting to rate it just as highly as the first. Then I got to the end, or rather the lack of an end. The story does not finish, rather the plot line is left open and the `end` is in a video game you cannot get any longer. It felt like a bad practical joke. As one reviewer said `All that and in the end I just spent a month watching a commercial for the video game`.

.Hack//Sign
At first this looks like a kiddie anime along the lines of Pokimon. It is set in an online Everquest like environment called The World. You discover that one of the characters is in trouble. Something has gone wrong with the environment and the user cannot log out. Because it is a virtual environment, the rest of the characters cannot figure out where the user is in the real world. They have to debug the system and resolve the hacking incident, which is what they discover the ultimate cause to be, from inside The World. You have the odd situation of sysadmins discussing server routing and protocol conflicts while dressed in full armour and battling with system bugs in the form of monsters. It is all very surreal.